Introduction
Imagine seeing how much of your utility costs you’re recovering from tenants across an entire portfolio, in real time. Imagine tenant billing happened automatically, saving your teams valuable time and eliminating errors. Imagine integrating consumption data into your tenant experience app to help your tenants reach their ESG goals. Imagine being able to recover thousands of more dollars a month.
Sounds great, right?
The technology to make this happen has been around for years, why hasn’t it been adopted in every asset?
Because change is difficult. Some buildings have had the same tenant billing practices for decades and overcoming that inertia is a challenge.
Even when you realize a better way forward, it is hard to do the upfront work, such as finding out how many meters each building has, capital planning and budgeting. The time and complication makes it an intimidating process.
When owners look at their whole portfolio, they often see all sorts of setups - some tenants billed in an automated fashion, others through a manual process, and others pro rata. They see different metering infrastructure in buildings and each building has different capital budgets.
Obviously, any strategy has to be flexible and work across several different scenarios.
While it can be more straightforward to do this for one or two buildings, for owners who have dozens or even hundreds of buildings, setting up an automated tenant billing system across the entire portfolio can seem impossible.
Despite how daunting it is, it has been done before, even in large, diverse portfolios. In fact, there is a blueprint that leading operators have followed:
Interested in a real life case study of the steps below? Download Digitizing Meter Readings and Strengthening Tenant Partnerships
- Mobile App: The first step is to identify assets doing work on pen and paper or spreadsheets and start conducting manual readings through a mobile app.
- Not only does this digitize tenant meter consumption amounts, it archives meter read images. This is helpful so property managers can show tenants the reading in case the tenant disputes the amount. The app can also reduce errors by flagging if there is a typo when entering the data.
- It integrates with billing, making the entire billing and meter reading process much faster. This can be done at scale no matter what kind of meter infrastructure is in the buildings currently.
- Meter Inventory: The process of conducting meter readings through a mobile app creates a meter inventory so owners can see how many meters there are in a property, where they are located, and what the manufacturer and remote-reading capabilities are.
- Creating a capital plan: Let’s say that you have a portfolio of 100 properties and each building has between 100 and 200 meters. To convert all those to digital meters and get automated meter readings would cost millions of dollars.
- However, the meter inventory above helps create a data-driven capital plan to decide the pace at which these meters get replaced, which properties to start out with, and how much capital to put in over the course of the 5-7 years that it could take to complete this project. These are large investments and you do not want to be guessing on the costs necessary to do this.
- Phase upgrades: By knowing the cost of capital upgrades and how many meters are in each building in your portfolio, you can plan out how to phase in the upgrades over the next few years.
Achieving automated tenant billing for your whole portfolio is not only achievable, but can be started in a low cost way that shows immediate important insights. By starting off adopting the right technology, it will make it easier to achieve an automated tenant billing system at scale for all your properties. Getting the process started will pay off for your tenants, staff, investors, and will make the job of owning the property much easier and smoother.
The Enertiv Platform is designed to bring you from A-Z. Schedule a demo today to see how your Tenant Billing can be digitized.
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